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| Ellen Gilchrist | |
Ellen Gilchrist, "a Southern writer with a sharp, sometimes indulgent eye for her region's foibles and eccentricities," died January 30, the New York Times reported. She was 88. Gilchrist "had spent part of her childhood on a family plantation in the Mississippi Delta... and her fiction was populated by the gentry that came from that land, in both its urban and rural incarnations."
A disciple of Eudora Welty, with whom she studied at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s, Gilchrist published more than 25 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry and memoirs.
She won the National Book Award in 1984 for her collection Victory Over Japan, but it was her first collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), "which depicted in large part the fissures and pathologies of the New Orleans upper class, that was in some ways most characteristic. She considered it her best work," the Times noted.
First published by the University of Arkansas Press, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams was an unexpected hit for a university press. "It was this huge success and sold all the copies in about a week, and then he kept printin' 'em," Gilchrist said in her interview at the university, where she taught English and creative writing for 25 years. The book sold more than 10,000 copies in its first 10 months; was republished by what became her principal publisher, Little, Brown; and earned critical acclaim.
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams also launched Gilchrist as a writer when she was 46 and had endured a complicated personal life that included, as she wrote in the essay collection, The Writing Life (2005), "four marriages, three caesarean sections, an abortion, 24 years of psychotherapy and lots of lovely men," as well as a struggle with alcoholism.
Gilchrist's other books include Drunk With Love (1986), Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989), I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas (1990), Collected Stories (2000), Nora Jane: A Life in Stories (2005), Acts of God (2014), Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (1987), The Writing Life (2005), and Things Like the Truth: Out of My Later Years (2016).
Gilchrist fell into the writing life almost by accident, though she had always written, mostly poetry. In The Writing Life, she wrote: "I was busy falling in love and getting married to three different men (I married the father of my children twice) and having babies and buying clothes and getting my hair fixed and running in the park and playing tennis."